Mike Pompeo’s CIA Director Hearing: 3 Questions Congress Must Ask

Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman, Tea Party member, and fierce critic of Hillary Clinton, is President-elect Trump’s pick for CIA director. Pompeo has no direct espionage experience, but has served on the House Intelligence Committee since 2011 and also on the CIA subcommittee. He attended West Point and Harvard Law School, and served in the Army at the end of the Cold War and in a Gulf War tour. After a one-day delay, his confirmation hearing begins Thursday. Here’s what they should ask him.

Pompeo is an outspoken conservative, known for his opinionated Tweets and for grilling Hillary Clinton during the Benghazi hearings. If confirmed, he would oversee the international intelligence gathering organization that as of 2013 had a $15 billion budget and more than 20,000 employees. More importantly, he would join the CIA amid a growing, potentially dangerous rift between the intelligence community and the incoming administration.

How will he approach the balance between obtaining intelligence and respecting the civil rights?

A fundamental tension of spying is how to gather critical, even potentially life-saving, intelligence without unjust infringement on privacy and human rights. The CIA is not a law-enforcement organization, and does the bulk of its work internationally, but it has domestic operations as well.

For starters, Pompeo has shown that he is an advocate of mass surveillance and bulk data collection. In 2015, for example, he introduced a bill to restore and extend broad surveillance powers for the National Security Agency. “To crush these terrorists abroad, we need to use all the legal means in our toolbox to take them on. This means empowering our intelligence agencies to do their jobs and track terrorist activity,” Pompeo wrote in a National Review essay. “Less intelligence capacity equals less safety. … We cannot expect our intelligence professionals to prevent terrorist attacks while handcuffing them at the same time.”

Pompeo’s Congressional record also leads some to wonder how he would reconcile the goal of spying with human rights protections in practice. “As a member of Congress he’s had the tendency to really lay the blame on the Muslim community for acts of terrorism, and that’s an extraordinarily dangerous mindset,” says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Does he have the objectivity to do the job on behalf of the American public or is he going to do it to the exclusion of certain segments of the American public? That’s the most concerning aspect, the potential for unequal application of the law.”

How will he navigate the increasingly politicized nature of intelligence-gathering in the US?

The CIA is often said to float above politics, and proposed CIA directors are frequently asked to pledge during confirmation hearings that they can be non-partisan decision-makers. This of all weeks, with an unverified bombshell report accusing Trump of being in Russia’s pocket, that might be a particularly hard thing to address.

As a Tea Partier who was not thought of as a moderate representative, Pompeo already has a partisan record to address. But he would also be leading the CIA at a time when politics and the intelligence community are clashing. President-elect Trump’s dismissive attitude toward our spy agencies’ attribution of election meddling to Russia has created a problematic rift, and the leak of a third-party, unsubstantiated dossier of supposed Trump malfeasance has exacerbated the issue.

Trump is in the process of walking back some of his most aggressive assertions—he now concedes that Russia did hack the DNC—but still denies the intelligence community conclusion that disinformation campaigns and leaks perpetrated by Russia during the presidential campaign season had any impact on the US election. If confirmed, Pompeo would step into a delicate situation given that one of the main CIA directives is to provide intelligence specifically to the White House. And as the intelligence community as a whole grapples with uncertainty and scrambles to find its place in the new administration, the CIA director will need to navigate competition with other agencies. “The lines of communication between the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and DHS are not nearly as efficient as they should be,” says Joseph Loomis, the CEO of CyberSponse, a frequent DHS and intelligence contractor. “Are you willing to put your career on the line to do what’s best for the mission versus the politics of your position?”

How will Pompeo’s CIA approach to detention and interrogation?

In 2009 Pompeo criticized President Obama for closing secret CIA prisons, knowns as “black sites,” around the world. He also condemned the Senate Intelligence Committee for releasing a 525-page report in December 2014 about human rights infringements committed by the CIA in its detention and interrogation program the prior decade. “Our men and women who were tasked to keep us safe in the aftermath of 9/11—our military and our intelligence warriors—are heroes, not pawns in some liberal game,” he said.

In a letter to the Senate last week, the board of directors of Amnesty International USA said, “We write to urge you to promote legal commitments against torture and other forms of ill-treatment, including so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ at the confirmation hearing of Representative Michael Pompeo … You should seek Rep. Pompeo’s explicit commitment to upholding U.S. and international law on torture and other ill-treatment.”